


Symptomatic

by draculard



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Fantasy, Trauma Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-19
Updated: 2019-04-19
Packaged: 2020-01-16 12:40:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18521722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: He knows there's more than one way to be a survivor. Even so, he can't help but feel like he's doing it wrong.





	Symptomatic

It’s just a fantasy, and like many of his fantasies, it starts with a nightmare — a dream full of anxious snapshots, things that really happened, things that probably didn’t. Foyet’s hands on his wrists; the bite of a knife sliding through his skin, between his ribs; lips on his neck, fingers scrabbling at his belt buckle.

The first night he dreams it, Hotch wakes in a sweat, still aching from where Foyet stabbed him, still covered in bandages from the hospital.

The second night he dreams it, he wakes gasping for breath with his cock straining at the front of his sweatpants.

Some things are untenable. Some things must be controlled, and this is one of them. That night, Hotch grits his teeth and forces himself to ignore it, forces himself to think of other things — anything — a crime scene, a dead body, anything that will kill his unexplainable arousal without crossing the line, without raiding the compartment deep in his mind where he keeps images and thoughts and feelings he refuses to consider.

Haley’s body. Foyet’s face, ruined and leaking blood. The muddled confusion of emotions, the swirling fog so thick and conflicting Hotch can’t even begin to sort through it. It all starts to leak through because of one terrible dream, and once that happens, Hotch finds that he’s able to shove all of it away.

All of it, even the pool of desire in his stomach. He locks it in that untouchable compartment and finds himself lying in bed, cold and spent. Too exhausted even to sleep.

* * *

It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens gradually, the way everything happens in Hotch’s life. For months — years — when he thinks of that night, it brings him nothing but nausea, panic, pain. He thinks of Foyet and his heart-rate accelerates, his face grows flushed, his hands begin to tremble.

Symptoms of trauma.

Symptoms of other things, too.

He can never pinpoint the exact moment his feelings change — from fear to arousal, from revulsion to desire. He remembers what happened to him only in fragments. The dry ache between his legs as Foyet pushed into him, the bruising grip on his wrists, the teeth leaving sharp, stinging marks on his collar bones, his neck.

He thinks of Foyet raping him and feels a wave of nausea so all-consuming that it makes his limbs weak, makes him break out in a shivering sweat.

He thinks of Foyet raping him and it makes his cock hard, no matter whether he’s at home in relative safety, with nothing to harm him but his own mind, or whether he’s at the office, at the round table, at a crime scene, on the plane.

He tells himself it’s common amongst rape victims. He rereads the textbooks he first encountered as a college freshman, outlining the basics of trauma and recovery. He tries to convince himself that even if his memory is true — even if he suffered the most intense orgasm of his life under Foyet’s brutal hands — there’s nothing to be ashamed of.

It happens. It’s common, even. Intellectually, he knows this is true.

Even so, it hurts.

* * *

By the time he’s ready to have sex again — when he can muscle through it without a panic attack, without a flashback, without the slightest hint of nausea — the damage has been done. He sticks to women, thinking nothing bad could possibly enter his mind if he’s fucking someone who’s soft where Foyet was hard, gentle where Foyet was rough.

It doesn’t work. When his cock hardens, it’s not because the woman in his bed arouses him. It’s because her skin reminds him of his own, reminds him of the way Foyet ripped Hotch’s clothes off his body, of the bruises and torn flesh and the red, raw marks left by Foyet’s teeth.

She is kind to Hotch — sweet and understanding, giving — but when he comes it’s only because he’s picturing Foyet in her place. Because he imagines himself held down and brutalized, too weak from blood loss to protect himself or even look Foyet in the eye. He imagines being raped and stabbed (a real event, a real _trauma_ , something he should hate more than anyone else in the world because it happened to _him_ — this is _his_ pain, _his_ nightmare, not his fantasy) and it sends a spark of pleasure through him that eats its way across his nerve endings, that bleeds into his skin and roots deep into the base of his scars.

After everything is over, he lies in bed trembling and the woman beside him runs her hands soothingly over his back. He barely feels it.

~~He wishes she would dig her nails in, make him bleed.~~

~~He wishes she were holding him down, straddling his waist, digging a knife into his ribs.~~

He wishes she would go.


End file.
